Steam Trading Cards Available To The Masses This Week

If you missed out on the Steam Trading Card beta, don't fret. You'll be able to start collecting when the program goes into wide release in just a few days.

Starting on Wednesday June 26 at 11 AM Pacific, everyone will be able to start hoarding cards from a number of different games. Valve also revealed that some anticipated features, namely trade offers and the card binder, have been bumped down the road a bit.

If you were part of the beta, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the program. Sound off in the comments.

This was a fun little something to do on the side. I was in the beta, and I reinstalled Portal 2 and Half-Life 2 to get some of the cards. It was nice to go back and revisit some older titles, driven by the card system. Even made a couple of bucks on the marketplace!

Hope you folks enjoy it, as something absolutely free is really not that bad (unless you happen to go by Sam's Club, where the lady hands you out free pizza roll samples, but the inside is too hot, you burn your mouth, then there is a lawsuit filling. While waiting for the lawsuit, you have this intense aversion to anything pizza related, so, on family pizza night, you simply sit in the corner, dreaming of a better, non-pizzaphobic life. So you walk down those long and lonely streets, past pizza parlors and Dominos, until you find a lady of the night, but your pompousness towards STDs and think about how taboo it would be to talk about it on a freaking gaming website, so you decide to get some ice cream. Ice cream isn't free.)

I would've liked the Steam Trading Card thing more if I gotten the complete set once just for owning the game and playing it. Then I would only have to trade for the sets again only to level up the badge. I don't know how much the cards are going for in the TF2 economy but it's probably not worth more of my attention than whatever hat I want to get.

Being in the Beta I can say that the novelty ran out pretty much instantly. If you enjoy collecting achievements in games then I guess this will be more your thing, but personally I often forgot I was even in the Beta as it made little to no impact on anything.

It's pretty fun so far but some of the free to play games are stupid when it comes to earning cards. The F2P games you have to spend money in game to get cards right now and that is just stupid as I don't want to pay money to get cards. Example, DotA 2 you have to pay $9 to get one card right now. I refuse to do that.

I got into the beat awhile ago and it's been quite enjoyable collecting cards from games you own, collecting the entire set rewards you with badges and profile experience, which in turn give you extra perks to your profile page.

The only complaint I have is that once you earn your max amount of cards (roughly half of the set) you can only get cards from trading, buying and the extra rare booster packs ( which award you a random set of cards that you are eligible for). The fact is you obviously can only trade cards you own and unless you want to pay real money for cards, you'll have to sacrifice to possibly complete a set.

What I think would have been a great idea is that once you earned the cards guaranteed to you, you will earn copies of those at random intervals in extended play. This in turn would promote more healthy trading, lower the price of selling cards which can in turn, prompt people to buy as the price of a digital card won't seem as ridiculous. Till then I'll wait for booster packs to hopefully make their way to me.

I love these trading cards. I've made $10 dollars just selling them off. Now that the beta is ending I expect the market to nose dive so I'll be able to buy all the cards I sold back for a fraction of the cost.

This was a terrible Beta. I got as many TF2 and HL2 cards as I could early on, and they have just sat there the whole time. There was no reason for me to trade, other than the one duplicate Medic I briefly had. If I ever get a booster pack it might be better, but until then it's pointless.